


META: Story Arcs in The Force Awakens

by rexluscus



Series: Rex's Star Wars Meta [7]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 10:14:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: An essay on why Finn and Rey are both protagonists ofThe Force Awakens, plus an essay on Kylo's character arc.





	1. The Case for TFA's Dual Protagonists

I hear some people don’t think Finn is a lead character in TFA. Let me explain, in excruciating detail, why they’re wrong.

I’m not some kind of expert on this Hollywood story structure shit, but I know a thing or two. And if you plot TFA’s story beats against the traditional 120-minute screenplay paradigm, it becomes clear that  **TFA has dual protagonists: Finn and Rey**. Being a protagonist has nothing to do with whether you have Force powers, end up with the lightsaber by the end, or defeat the bad guy by yourself. A protagonist is a structural function. It means the conflict you face is also the conflict that organizes the story as a whole. That conflict begins with the inciting incident in Act 1 and is resolved by the climax in Act 3.

There are several conflicts in TFA—the search for Luke, the threat posed by Starkiller Base, Han and Leia’s desire to redeem Ben—but what is the  _main_ conflict? The search for Luke is clearly the main  _external_ conflict, but the film’s climax has nothing to do with it, so it can’t be the  _main_ conflict. Starkiller Base also can’t be the main conflict, because its threat isn’t established until halfway through the film. Ditto for Han and Leia’s desire to redeem Ben. The only conflicts that are established in Act 1 and resolved by the climax pertain to Finn and Rey, and they’re  _internal_ conflicts. All of the major end-of-act turning points relate to Finn and Rey overcoming their fears, embracing their heroic potential and joining the fight against the First Order. If you assume  _those_ as your main conflicts, your basic Hollywood three-act paradigm maps onto the film pretty well.

Let’s be clear about what that paradigm entails, minimally: 1) a set-up that introduces key story elements, 2) an inciting incident within the first 15 minutes or so, 3) a major turning point right before the end of Act 1, at around 30 minutes, 4) a mid-act turning point in Act 2 that redefines or reorients the conflict, at around 60 minutes, 5) a major turning point right before the end of Act 2, at around 90 minutes, and 6) a climax that resolves the conflict somewhere in the middle of Act 3, at 100-110 minutes, 7) usually followed by a resolution. You’ll hear about other elements but these are the basic ones that most people seem to agree on.

TFA’s runtime is about 126 minutes. So let’s see what happens if we treat Finn and Rey as dual protagonists:

**Act 1 Set-Up**

**:05** Poe is captured (setting him on an intercept course with Finn), BB-8 is sent away (setting him on an intercept course with Rey), and Finn is introduced  
**:10**  Finn first takes off his helmet  
**:11** Rey is introduced

Finn is introduced a good 6 minutes before Rey. But a later moment connects Rey and Finn visually: the cut from Finn replacing his helmet after Phasma yells at him to Rey’s masked face as she scavenges the Star Destroyer.

**Inciting Incident**

**:19**  Rey refuses to trade in BB-8 for the 50 portions  
**:20** Finn rescues Poe

The inciting incident is usually described as the moment the protagonist can no longer abide the status quo and must encounter conflict to pursue their goal, which sets the story in motion. In TFA, this is clearly Finn’s escape with Poe. Without that, the rest of the story doesn’t happen. And it originates in an active goal of Finn’s, which he pursues throughout the film: he hates the evil of the First Order and wants to get away from them and be safe and free and happy and  _him,_ not some First Order automaton. Moreover, he wants other people to be together with and be safe and happy with, and he wants to be a good person. These desires eventually conflict.

So that’s Finn. But the script makes a point of juxtaposing  _his_  act of status-quo-breaking with Rey’s refusal to trade in BB-8 for the 50 portions. This is the moment Rey breaks out of her survival/subsistence routine to oppose evil and defend her new friend—just like Finn did. Plotwise, Rey’s friendship with BB-8 is important since it’s BB-8 who ultimately brings Finn and her together and sets them off on their journey. But the real point is that Finn and Rey make parallel, nearly simultaneous decisions to do what is right instead of what is easy, both with story-determining consequences. This should alert us to a dual protagonist situation right off the bat.

**Act 1 Turning Point**

**:29** Rey and Finn meet, Finn tells Rey he’s “with the Resistance” and Rey tells him about BB-8’s secret mission, then the First Order spots them and they flee Jakku

This is a single event with structural significance for both Finn’s and Rey’s conflicts—another sign we might be dealing with dual protagonists. For Rey, it’s the moment her desire for adventure and direct action against evil gets the better of her need to wait for her family on Jakku. For Finn, it’s the moment his desire for a friend who respects him gets the better of his desire for safety. Of course, they’re also just running for their lives—but the actual turning point happens  _before_ the First Order spots them, when Finn tells Rey he’s “with the Resistance” and Rey is basically like “okay let’s go!” (The deal is sealed for Rey, I think, when Finn mentions Luke Skywalker and her eyes light up.)

A word about Rey’s motivations. Rey’s conflict is this: she wants to reunite with her family, but she also wants to fight tyranny and have adventures and maybe, just maybe, be like Luke Skywalker. You can tell by the way she reacts to the news that Finn is a Resistance fighter. She’s his opposite in this regard: she’s actually eager for the direct confrontation with evil he wants to avoid. So when Finn’s desire for friendship starts to outweigh his fear of the First Order, Rey’s choices start to drive the story a little more directly. Rey decides they’re going to return BB-8 to the Resistance and that’s that.

The Act 1 climax is the Falcon’s escape from the First Order, and Act 2 begins once Finn, Rey and BB-8 decide to head for the Resistance base (:38). But the Act 1 turning point is that first meeting between Finn and Rey. Finn’s white lie and Rey’s enthusiastic embrace of it are the events that make everything else happen.

Then we get the early Act 2 complications of meeting Han and Chewie and escaping from the pirates. Which brings us to Maz Kanata and the Act 2 midpoint:

**Act 2 Midpoint**

**1:04**  Finn confesses he’s not a Resistance fighter and leaves with the smugglers  
**1:06**  Rey finds the lightsaber, has her vision, learns about the Force and runs off into the forest

The very awkwardness of the plotting here results, I think, from trying to accommodate two protagonists. Again, both Finn and Rey encounter a similar turning point at about the same time: they both refuse the call to adventure. Finn decides he’d rather be safe than have friends and do what’s right; and Rey rejects the call of the Force. It also seems significant that this turning away from their respective vocations is also the moment they’re separated.

These moments also occur within a few minutes of Starkiller Base’s destruction of the Hosnian system (1:09), which if you’re thinking in terms of the film’s  _external_  conflicts is clearly an Act 2 midpoint of sorts, since it introduces the main threat the characters will face for the second half of the film. But the real, load-bearing midpoints are Finn’s confession and departure and Rey’s rejection of the Force.

Then Rey gets kidnapped by Kylo Ren, which forces her to reckon with the Force whether she wants to or not; and Finn realizes he can’t run for safety after all because he cares about Rey too much. Which brings us to:

**Act 2 Turning Point**

**1:29** Rey uses the Force to resist Kylo Ren  
**1:32**  Finn contributes his expertise to the plan to attack Starkiller Base and rescue Rey

The whole second half of Act 2 is the “coming into their powers” sequence for both Finn and Rey, intercut with each other since they’re now in separate places. Finn finds himself more or less joining the Resistance and contributing what he knows about the First Order, then agreeing to participate in the most dangerous part of the plan. Rey finds herself using the Force to defend herself against Kylo Ren. The second half of the movie is now clearly going to be about Finn and Rey moving  _toward_ the things they tried to flee from at the Act 2 midpoint: the Force for Rey, and dangerous Resistance action for Finn.

The Act 2 turning point is where you can really feel the strain on all of the different conflicts in the TFA script. I had to rewatch it to figure out exactly what’s happening, but here’s basically how it works: Kylo Ren interrogates Rey, and against his, her and our expectations, she defeats him. It’s a huge turning point for her because she has stopped running away from the Force and is now  _using_ it against her enemies. This produces a series of consequences, the first being that Snoke decides they need to fire the Starkiller weapon at the Resistance base ASAP. This in turn forces Finn’s Act 2 turning point. Not only is there now a ticking clock for everyone on D'Qar, but his goal shifts—from rescuing Rey to rescuing Rey  _and_ helping the Resistance destroy Starkiller Base. The guy who’d only wanted to get as far away from the First Order as possible now volunteers for the most dangerous part of the mission: infiltrating Starkiller Base to lower the defensive shields.

Act 3 begins when Finn, Han and Chewie set out for Starkiller (1:35), I’d say. Finn’s storyline marks the act break more than Rey’s, in my opinion. However, Rey’s first step toward embracing the Force triggers the external event that  _causes_  Finn’s turning point and sets up Act 3 as a whole, so it’s hard to say whose storyline is more structurally load-bearing. Finn’s turning point is more of a conscious choice than Rey’s, which is mostly a defensive reaction to Ren’s attack; Finn’s choices also implicate more characters. But those choices still depend (even if Finn’s not aware of it) on Rey’s actions. So, like I said—dual protagonists.

(If you treated Rey as the sole protagonist, you might consider the beginning of Act 3 to be her escape from Ren via Jedi mind trick. That would deemphasize the structural importance of Finn’s turning point, since the planning of the Resistance attack would now be firmly in early Act 3, not late Act 2. But doesn’t the Falcon’s journey to Starkiller Base  _feel_ morelike an act-opening beat? It does to me. This, however, is what often happens with dual protagonists: the structure gets messy. Ultimately, Act 2 can’t really end until both Finn and Rey have turned their respective corners.)

So now Finn and Rey reunite, Han dies, and Chewie blows up the charges in the thermal oscillator. Setting us up for the…

**Climax**

**1:52** Finn faces Kylo Ren  
**1:56** Rey calls on the Force to defeat Ren

Make no mistake: the climax of the film isn’t the X-Wing attack on Starkiller Base, because that’s consequent to what’s happening on the ground (although the script tries to make us  _feel_ like a lot is riding on the X-Wing subplot). The climax isn’t Han’s death either, because as climactic as that feels, neither Han nor Kylo Ren is a protagonist. The true climax has to be the lightsaber duel Finn and Rey fight with Ren. Why? Because it resolves the conflicts that have structured the film as a whole.

Finn’s conflict has been his desire to be safe versus his desire to have friends and resist evil. His final test is to confront the First Order knowing he can’t win. He went to Starkiller Base to rescue Rey feeling like success was at least possible, but he  _knows_ Kylo Ren will kill him because Kylo Ren has the Force and he doesn’t. That’s the ultimate test of his courage: he takes a stand against evil and defends someone he loves even though he’s 99.9% certain he’ll be sacrificing his life. (Please take note: Finn’s  _loss_ to Ren successfully resolves his conflict, which is an  _internal_ conflict. Which in fact  _supports_ the claim that he’s a protagonist.) It’s a beautiful arc, really: Finn begins his transformation with an act of refusal and flight, then completes it with an act of personal sacrifice, not fleeing but facingevil, not to save himself but to save another. (Abrams does a nice thing where he shows Kylo Ren looming up  _behind_ Finn, so that Finn has to turn around to face him.)

Rey’s conflict is slightly muddier (which, again, is why I think Finn’s storyline was the original structural element that hers was built on top of). She has wanted to fight evil and find a family from the beginning, but since learning this might require her to use the Force, she has balked. So her conflict is resolved when she finally calls on the Force. This demands, as well (though in ways I don’t fully understand) that she stop looking backward, toward her lost family, and look forward toward her new, found family. (Thus Abrams has Ren force her  _backward_  until she calls on the Force and starts pushing forward. Hey, it’s not subtle, but I never expect  _Star Wars_  to be subtle.)

I can see why some people see Rey as the sole protagonist: the climax of  _her_ storyline feels most like the climax of the film as a whole, and it comes  _after_ Finn’s conflict has been resolved. And of course, ultimately she’s the one who defeats Ren. I still think it’s more accurate to say Finn and Rey resolve their respective conflicts together. I mean, those conflicts are basically  _the same_ (i.e. desire to do what’s right and be loved versus fear of danger, of their own heroic potential, etc.), their  _motivation_  is the same (i.e. love for each other and a sense of what’s right), and they triumph by helping and defending each other.

Here’s a timeline of the major story beats according to me:

Now look at how often Rey’s and Finn’s turning points occur within a few minutes of each other:

Doesn’t that look like a story built around two protagonists?

It could be argued that Finn merely makes Rey’s triumph possible, and I’ve seen Rey characterized as sole protagonist with Finn as merely her sidekick or helper. After all, Maz tells Finn to hang onto the lightsaber until Rey is ready for it, which he does until he’s struck down by Ren, at which point Rey takes it up, defeats Ren, and brings the lightsaber to Luke. This makes Finn the helper and Rey the real protagonist, right? 

Wrong. Remember, the main conflict is  _not_  the search for Luke; Rey’s journey to Luke is pure resolution, the consequence of a resolved conflict. (If the search for Luke were the main conflict, the climax would be the completion of the map, which basically happens by accident/luck after the real action is over!) The main conflict also clearly isn’t Kylo Ren himself, so it can’t be resolved by his defeat. The main conflict must be resolved  _before_ that, before the lightsaber duel is even over.

So, if we decide the main conflict is Rey’s resistance of her Force-related destiny, then Finn is arguably the protagonist of  _that_ conflict as much as Rey is! Because he makes it possible for her to take up the lightsaber, first by holding onto it for her and then by defending her at the expense of his life, and finally by motivating her to use it. So the “Finn is Rey’s sidekick” argument actually  _strengthens_ the case for Finn as a protagonist.

Moreover, if we flip things and treat Finn’s fear of the First Order versus his desire to protect his friends and do the right thing as the main conflict, then Rey appears as the helper figure much the way Finn appeared vis-a-vis Rey. She motivates him to join the Resistance and go to Starkiller Base. She also motivates him to fight Kylo Ren. She helps him resolve  _his_ conflict as much as he helps her resolve hers. Which is why it makes the most sense to treat them as dual protagonists, even though Finn’s conflict climaxes before Rey’s.

Actually, if I had to pick one of them as the sole protagonist, I’d probably pick Finn. His conflict is more clearly articulated and more structurally determinative. A major component of Rey’s conflict, the Force, isn’t introduced until the Act 2 midpoint. It’s true that the climax of herconflict is the climax of the whole film. But otherwise, her actions don’t mark larger turning points and act breaks with quite the same clarity as Finn’s do. Finn is also introduced first and shapes the plot more actively in Act 1. The story feels to me like Finn’s arc was plotted first and Rey’s was plotted to mirror his. Also, her conflict isn’t quite as elegantly unified as Finn’s. It’s a little muddy how “abandoning the wait for her family on Jakku” relates thematically to “embracing her Force sensitivity.” I know Maz kind of explains it and I’m sure you could convince me I’m just being dumb and/or overliteral, but not in 20 words or less, you know? Finn’s conflict is just more elegantly constructed.

Finn is also more clearly a POV character. He’s that audience stand-in who doesn’t know as much about how things work in this world than other characters do, so he mirrors the audience’s condition. We know about his internal struggle over the lie he told Rey, which aligns us with him against Rey somewhat, because we know things she doesn’t. In general, we feel Finn’s  _struggle_ from the very beginning of the film; he’s the character who shows us the moral parameters of this world. Rey develops more interiority once her Force subplot begins, but that’s over an hour in; before that, she’s a tad more inscrutable than Finn is. Finn’s actions also move  _other_ characters around more directly than Rey’s do (except perhaps at the end of Act 2). Rey does of course carry the climax and resolution of the film—but Finn carries much of the rest.

So that, my friends, is why I think Finn is a protagonist and a lead character in TFA.


	2. Kylo's Story Arc

I’m gonna analyze Kylo Ren’s character arc in TFA from a three-act story structure perspective. I admit, when I first saw TFA, Kylo’s arc was super unclear to me. But I think I’ve figured it out.

By the way, you can tell if a character has a major arc if their turning points line up with the turning points of the film as a whole. Which is why Kylo’s turning points correspond closely with Rey’s and Finn’s, something I didn’t notice on the first few viewings.

**TFA’s Story Structure**

The first chapter summarized the story structure of TFA in terms of Finn and Rey’s major turning points. Here's a quick summary:

In the simplest, most classic account of Hollywood film story structure, a film has three acts. Somewhere in the first act, there’s an inciting incident (Finn rescues Poe and Rey rescues BB-8) and near the end of the act, there’s a first major turning point (Finn and Rey meet and leave Jakku to take BB-8 to the Resistance). The midpoint of the film, which turns the story in a new direction, occurs in the second act (Finn confesses he’s a former Stormtrooper, Rey finds the lightsaber and discovers she has the Force, and Starkiller Base destroys the Hosnian system). The second act then ends with another major turning point (Rey resists Kylo’s interrogation and uses her powers for the first time, and Finn decides to join the Resistance’s attack on Starkiller Base). Then in the third act, you’ve just got rising action until you reach the climax (Finn and Rey fighting Kylo, Rey defeating him, and Poe destroying Starkiller Base), plus some falling action and then a resolution (Rey going off to find Luke). In that post I linked to above, you can see the timestamps when each of these events occur, which are generally in line with the timelines of most Hollywood feature films.

**Kylo’s Arc: Overview**

So, now for Kylo. I’m going to summarize his arc first and then put a detailed timeline at the end.

What I noticed first is what we already know: Kylo has an internal antagonist. That is unusual for a  _film’s_ antagonist. But here’s what’s funny about him: he  _knows_ his conflict is internal, but refuses to acknowledge it as such.

Finn and Rey have internal conflicts too, and Kylo personifies them, in a way. Kylo, of course, is always the aggressor, so he forces Finn and Rey to face their inner conflicts in order to resist him. For Finn, Kylo embodies the unstoppable destructive might of the First Order, which Finn first tries to flee and then ultimately confronts, sacrificing himself for his friend. By facing Kylo, Finn overcomes hisinner conflict between fear and love for his new friends. For Rey, Kylo represents the terrifying power of the Force that she doesn’t want anything to do with. When she faces Kylo, she overcomes that fear by embracing the Force and using it to defeat this creature who embodies that fear.

Similarly, Finn and Rey personify Kylo’sinner conflict: each of his important story beats involves his own failure to neutralize them so he can get what he wants (the map). But what he’s  _really_ mad about is his failure. As these failures cascade, he insists on treating Finn and Rey as his real antagonists, even though he’s aware that he’s his own worst enemy. He tries to fight his  _inner_ battle by fighting  _them._

So unlike Finn and Rey, Kylo directs his rage outward to  _avoid_  his real conflict. The way he sees it, he made a mistake when he didn’t report Finn and when he allowed Rey to escape (which retroactively reveals his mistake in abandoning the pursuit of BB-8 to capture Rey). So now he thinks he can correct his mistakes by killing or defeating Finn and Rey. If he can do that, he reasons, he’ll make it so that his temptation by the light never happened—which of course is impossible. Getting the better of Finn and Rey won’t resolve his conflict, but he  _thinks_ it will. And that’s mainly why he fails.

**Kylo’s Arc: Breakdown**

Kylo’s character arc begins when he senses FN-2187’s hesitation (insubordination? non-conformity?) and ignores it. (We never learn  _why_ he does this. He probably doesn’t know either.) The whole first act for him is just the consequences of that moment: he interrogates Poe and learns BB-8 has the map, but then FN-2187 escapes with Poe, and Hux’s troops fail to capture BB-8. His big meltdown at :37 is a direct response to the fact that his major goal (finding the map) has been thwarted by his own mistake, his failure to act on his suspicions about FN-2187.

The midpoint of his arc occurs at :50 in the big conversation with Snoke. That’s when Snoke offers him another way to defeat the light in him: confront and kill his father. (We aren’t told this explicitly at first, but we can put it together in retrospect.) A few minutes later, at :59, we learn he’s balking at Snoke’s test when he confesses to Darth Vader’s mask that he feels a “pull to the light” and needs help remembering the “power of the darkness.” His goal, by the way, has now bifurcated: he still wants the map, but now he’s got Snoke’s “test” to contend with too. Those two goals are related, though. The map is necessary to his goal of inheriting Darth Vader’s mantle, and killing his father will test (or augment) his power to achieve that goal.

If the first half of Kylo’s arc focuses on Finn, the second half focuses more on Rey. His second-act story beats are muddier because I think there’s a lot of stuff about Kylo that the filmmakers don’t want to tell us yet. But basically, Kylo changes his strategy in his pursuit of the map: from BB-8 to Rey. He pursues BB-8 into the forest, but encounters Rey instead, and things momentarily look up for him when he learns he might be able to extract the map from her mind. But taking Rey and leaving BB-8 turns out to be another mistake, which is compounded when Rey resists his interrogation and escapes. (It’s confusing, because Kylo seems oddly unaware or uninterested in the fact that  _Snoke_ doesn’t care if they get the map or not; he just wants to prevent the  _Resistance_  from getting it. Which makes Kylo’s decision to abandon BB-8 a fail either way, whether he gets the map from Rey or not. Maybe he’s ignoring Snoke’s emphasis on thwarting the Resistance because he’s hoping he can find and kill Luke first? If that’s his reasoning, Snoke clearly doesn’t have the same confidence in him.)

This moment of failure with Rey is important, because it’s when Kylo realizes that the “pull to the light” is affecting his strength. He should have been strong enough to yank that map right out of Rey’s head, but the light has weakened him. (That’s how he must see it, anyway.) But he reacts to this realization not by facing his own weakness but by resenting Rey’s strength and treating her as a rival. Weakened or not, he was still the strongest Force-user in the galaxy before; now there’s somebody who might surpass him, which ups the stakes for him to conquer that weakness by conquering his rival.

All of this forms his particular motivation to make sure he doesn’t fail Snoke’s “test” when the opportunity comes. In other words, the new goal of passing Snoke’s test masks his growing realization that he’s failing in every other way.

Now we come to an interesting question: what is the climax of Kylo’s arc? Is it his murder of Han, or is it his duel with Finn and Rey? Story people define the climax as the moment that resolves a character’s conflict definitively one way or the other—but that seems to be precisely what  _doesn’t_ happen when Kylo kills Han. Or maybe it  _does_ happen and he just can’t accept it. Kylo passes the test—he does the thing he was “supposed to do,” the thing he was afraid he didn’t have the strength for—and it  _still_ doesn’t solve his problem. In other words, his conflict resolves in defeat.

A lot of people perceive ambiguity about whether he has truly embraced the dark side by killing Han, but I think it’s pretty clear from how he reacts to seeing Finn and Rey. He looks up, sees them, gets a “you little shits, it’s all  _your_ fault!” look on his face, and goes after them. This is him realizing his desperate gambit to commit himself to the dark side didn’t work—but instead of facing that, he doubles down in his attempt to make Finn and Reythe cause of all his problems. He keeps fighting even though it’s already over, still hoping to fix the mistakes he made at the beginning and thus pretend he hasn’t failed. “We’re not done yet,” he tells them, and I think that’s him refusing to accept that the arc of his conflict—his struggle to extinguish that weakening “pull to the light"—ended in defeat when he killed Han.

So he fights them, and in his duel with Finn, things seem to look up for him, but then it’s one failure after another. He’s not strong enough to call Anakin’s lightsaber to himself—his bid to fulfill Vader’s legacy fails. Then he backs Rey into a corner and  _doesn’t_ press his advantage. Much like he did in the interrogation scene, he tries in his own violent way to turn her to his side but can’t, and she defeats him. But these defeats are all consequences of his refusal to accept that he’s  _already_   _lost_ his internal conflict. Killing Han was supposed to make him stronger but it didn’t. The bowcaster wound represents that: he’s weaker now as a result of what he did, which means the "pull to the light” has triumphed. But he keeps on fighting, hoping it hasn’t, trying to correct a mistake that can’t be corrected because it’s only a  _sign_ of the deeper flaw in himself.

Kylo shouting “traitor!” at Finn works on several levels. Finn is a traitor to the First Order, of course, but Kylo has no reason to take that personally. So maybe from Kylo’s point of view, Finn betrayed the mercy Kylo took on him by not ratting him out to his superiors. Kylo sees a part of  _himself_ as treasonous, and he identifies Finn with this part, since it had mercy on Finn. So when he shouts at Finn, he’s really shouting at the disloyal, light-side part of himself, the part that’s been seduced by the light. Again, he refuses to see that Finn is only a projection of his inner conflict.

Rey is another story. As soon as he meets her, he seems to feel some commonality with her. Once he’s captured her, he tries to be  _nice_ to her in his own fucked-up, coercive way. This doesn’t stop him from trying to take the map from her, but he senses that they’re similar (“Don’t be afraid, I feel it too”) even though he insists on exerting his supposedly superior strength over her. You get the feeling he wants a friend, albeit one he can completely dominate.

But of course she turns out to be stronger than him, and she rejects his weird overtures, senses his fear and weakness, and forces  _him_ to acknowledge them as well. He has a terrible moment of self-awareness, but he shoves it away, persisting in his belief that he can still dominate her and remove the obstacle she poses to his goals. So as with Finn, Rey is a projection of an inner conflict that he insists on seeing as an external one.

Ultimately the same thing happens with Han. He has this moment of connection with someone he loves, in which Han forces him to  _see_  his true conflict. (“I’m being torn apart.”) But ultimately, he rejects that insight and projects his conflict back onto Han, reverting to his belief that if he can kill his father, he can kill the light in himself. This is his true moment of failure—when he sees most clearly what his conflict really  _is_ and chooses not to face it.

**Kylo’s Arc: Detailed Timeline**

:06 Kylo introduced

:09 Kylo’s inciting incident: he notices the insubordinate Stormtrooper but lets him go

:17 Kylo interrogates Poe and learns where the map is

:22 Kylo learns his insubordinate Stormtrooper is escaping with the prisoner he just interrogated

:26 Hux accuses Kylo of letting his “personal interest interfere with orders from Leader Snoke”

:37 Kylo’s first-act turning point: he learns FN-2187 has escaped Jakku with BB-8 and freaks the fuck out; he also learns of Rey’s existence

:50 Kylo’s second-act midpoint: Hux and Kylo talk to Snoke; the loss of BB-8 leads to the decision to use Starkiller against the Republic; Hux throws shade at Kylo; Snoke mentions “an awakening” and also Han Solo, who is a “test” for Kylo; Kylo replies “by the grace of your training I will not be seduced”

:59 Kylo confesses his “pull to the light” and asks Darth Vader to “show [him] again the power of the darkness”

1:13 Kylo arrives on Takodana

1:17-18 Kylo attacks Rey in the forest, then decides to let BB-8 go and get the map from her instead

1:27-28 Kylo interrogates Rey and takes off his mask; he tries to extract the map from her mind but she reads  _his_ mind instead; she says “you’re afraid you’ll never be as strong as Darth Vader”

1:29-31 Kylo’s second-act turning point: he tells Snoke Rey resisted him, Hux tells Snoke about Kylo letting BB-8 go, and Snoke orders Hux to fire on the Ileenium system, then orders Kylo to bring Rey to him; Kylo discovers Rey has escaped and freaks out a second time

1:35-6 Kylo orders Stormtroopers to find Rey, then senses Han Solo’s presence

1:44 Kylo comes back into the oscillator (probably right after the deleted scene when he searches the Millennium Falcon) and clearly makes his decision to intercept Han

1:45-49 Kylo’s climax: he goes out onto the bridge, Han asks him to come home, Kylo wavers and then kills him, gets shot, notices Rey and Finn and chases them

The rest is falling action for Kylo: the consequences of his decision at the climax:

1:51 Kylo intercepts Rey and Finn in the forest

1:53 Kylo reaches for the lightsaber but it goes to Rey instead

1:56-8 Kylo’s resolution: he offers to show Rey the ways of the Force, and she refuses and defeats him

(If you compare his turning points with Finn’s and Rey’s, they mostly happen pretty close together. Sometimes he’s ahead of them, sometimes he’s behind, but they usually happen within 5-10 minutes of each other.)

**Author's Note:**

> This meta was originally posted on Tumblr, but I'm posting it here to make sure it's preserved.


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